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It is true that in 1863 Manet had drawn upon his head the thunderous wrath of Paris by exhibiting his Déjeuner sur l'Herbe and Olympe by no means a representative effort of the painter's genius, despite its diabolic cleverness. He studied Hals and with what glorious results in Le Bon Bock!
Be the quantity large or small, it is all that he will get. If he does not eat it all, he may carry home what remains. The host does not eat with his guests. He cuts up some tobacco, and carefully mixes it with l'herbe, and when all have finished eating, he fills and lights a pipe, which is smoked and passed from one to another, beginning with the first man on his left.
His <i Olympia> seemed to me the greatest picture of modern times, and <i Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe> moved me profoundly. These works seemed to me the last word in painting. I will not describe the pictures that Strickland showed me. Descriptions of pictures are always dull, and these, besides, are familiar to all who take an interest in such things.
But after that he was rejected, whether it was a question of the Fifre or of the Déjeuner sur l'herbe. This canvas, with an admirable feminine nude, created a scandal, because an undressed woman figured in it amidst clothed figures, a matter of frequent occurrence with the masters of the Renaissance.
"And there are trees there, and we could have tea under them," continued the General now in utter despair. "Nous boirons du lait, sur l'herbe fraiche," added De Griers with the snarl almost of a wild beast. "Du lait, de l'herbe fraiche" the idyll, the ideal of the Parisian bourgeois his whole outlook upon "la nature et la verite"! "Have done with you and your milk!" cried the old lady.
Gerarde, describing it, tells us how, "the root of Solomon's seal stamped, while it is fresh and greene, and applied, taketh away in one night, or two at the most, any bruise, black or blue spots, gotten by falls, or women's wilfulness in stumbling upon their hasty husbands' fists." For the same reason it was called by the French herbalists "l'herbe de la rupture."
Being the largest and most conspicuous work shown, it attracted no less attention than if it had been officially hung, and probably much more. "Ainsi ce Déjeuner sur l'herbe," says M. Duret, "venait-il faire comme une énorme tache. Il donnait la sensation de quelquechose outré. Il heurtait la vision.
It was in 1863 that the storm of popular fury burst over Manet's head, on the exhibition of his first important picture, painted three years before, generally known as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. This wonderful canvas was something so new and so surprising that it was rejected by the jury of the Salon.
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